One of the first steps every new blogger takes, is to submit her blog in Technorati. It is argued very often, that technorati can really boost the traffic of your blog.

Apart from the fact, that I have never seen any traffic coming from Technorati, I really don’t believe it is a service worth a blogger’s time.

I will not discuss its ugly design and slow interface but will concentrate on more actual reasons. Reasons, that deeply influence the user experience and also disregard fair blog ranking.

Usability issues

Anyone who has navigated in the Technorati page understands what I’m saying.

First of all the categories are not “synchronized”. As the image below shows, the entertainment roll-over category has subcategories such as “main”, “tv”, “Celebrity”, etc. while the entertainment category of the blogs has different subcategories.

Apart from that, administrating your account and blogs is a really hard issue. Lets say you want to ping your blog. The start page of technorati has a box of your blogs on the right giving the user the option to manage them and/or ping them.

But if the user is in his account, there is no ping or manage option - even when she clicks on the blog link itself. (see the above image and the two below) Shouldn’t these options be gathered in one place, or at least available in many?

I have my blog under a directory on my server. The main url (changemod.com) redirects to the directory of the blog (changemod.com/755). It’s something many bloggers do. Why can’t we just merge two domains?

Ranking issues

To be honest, I don’t find Technorati fair. It has a ranking system, based on authority (incoming links to a blog) and number of fans which does not take categories, topics or freshness into account. The authority ranking of Technorati:

• compares completely different blogs (e.g. gossip with technology). You cannot say, that icanhascheezburger is more popular than Smashing Magazine. They are completely different topics and it is like comparing apples with oranges.
• it promotes seniority and not freshness. Since authority and fans are the only ways to see popularity, it is logical that the most old blog will be the most popular. New blogs, do not get fairly promoted in Technorati, even if they increase in popularity faster than the major blogs.

Conclusion

I don’t say, that Technorati is absolutely worthless. It works great as a data source to monitor your reputation. But as a blog aggregator or a traffic-building tool is not our best bet.

This doesn’t mean, that Technorati collects bad information, it just doesn’t show them right. The relation between time investment required and information provided is not for the benefit of the user.

I really stay in awe, that this service remains so successful, without improving itself and I would really like to know why.

I’m really interested to know, what is your experience with Technorati. Do you get any traffic from it? Do you use it as an information aggregator among the other social networks?